Though the album now comes with studio polish and masterful songwriting, W H O K I L L still feels like an underground tape, challenging the listeners with oddball melodic choices.

Without a dull moment in sight, Reep has succeeded in creating something of an ethereal masterpiece.

Instrumentally, Ignorance transcends the traditional folk that The Weather Station tirelessly perfected over the previous four albums. With an ever-expanding palette of sonics at her disposal, Lindeman weaves these tales of turmoil and regret through the usage of everything possible – horns, strings, several subtle non-acoustic guitars, and most prominently the piano. To reach the levels of awareness she sought required another level of sound, and it crackles throughout Ignorance.

The songs are so masterfully constructed and the mood throughout so consistent that the key complaint must be that it has to inevitably come to an end; a sure-fire sign that an album is doing something right.

She’s a painter of sound, of mood. And one feels after listening to this document of searching textures, yearning melodies, and newfound sonic intimacy, that she’s only getting started.

It is the inability to identify a precise sound, while all the while remaining consistent, that is W's greatest achievement, a notion as ambiguous and tempting as Rostron herself.

God’s Country is a truly wonderful, twisted record. About halfway through you start thinking it’s maybe the best debut album of the year, and by the end of the first play you start thinking it’s possibly the album of the year. It’s intimate, expansive, political and deeply personal, unsettling, upsetting and life affirming.

A subtle shift toward curated production and raw lyrical revelation. Which isn’t to say that her earlier records didn’t have those things, but they feel far more present and deliberate here. Running once more in complete sync with inflo, these songs are some of Simz’s most personal and most vitriolic, masked in measured rhythms and encased in the wrath of someone who’s too tired to give a fuck.

Let us hope this isn't a flash-in-the-pan success and that subsequent releases are just as good.

By the time Once Twice Melody reaches its closing moments, it sounds like the band are taking a well-earned victory lap in a career full of wins.

Del Rey’s longest album to date by some distance – and not without the occasionally questionable choice. But the best moments, which abound, solidify Del Rey as one of the all-time greats.

Beyoncé has given us her most excessive body of work to date. It is unfocused, it swerves and changes directions, yet delivers quality in so many different ways no part of it can be called inessential. While one could choose a cynical route and think their way into not appreciating the full product, the truth is history will be kind to Cowboy Carter as yet another classic album from Queen Bey.

These twelve tracks are full, they're self-aware, they're straight up funny, and it's these traits that immediately separate Father John Misty's folk-rock from what Fleet Foxes do.

Cut the World is compelling enough to change the way we appreciate the world and its sad beauty. There's simply nothing that sounds quite like this.

The Italian duo have put together a timeless and beautiful dance record that slides easily to the top of 2012′s best.

Changes is a meticulously crafted album that brims with hooks, deceptively complex vocals, and timely ambivalence; oh, add a sprinkle of hard-won morale – perfect for spring 2026.

Headlights solidifies Alex G’s gift for tapping into the familiarity across our individual experiences. His melodies are oftentimes warm and inviting while also imbued with quirky flourishes that evoke a potent nostalgia. His lyrics bring to life scenes that are specific, relatable, and very often painful.

Ultimately, it might not be a more serious album than anything previous, but Shangri-La captures the spirit of uncertainty and restlessness that 21st century modernity has created.

On Ultimate Success Today, Protomartyr have made essential jams for a genre that’s been passed around dozens of times over. It’s nice to know that, five albums deep, the band haven’t lost any ferocity, and that they continue to be a mouthpiece for so many feelings we all share.

Whether her words come from personal experience or not, Yanya’s able to swell with empathy in ways few current songwriters can convey. It’s audible how she places herself within the circumstances of a song, maybe to feel herself, but in doing so she connects with her audience on a different level.

Where there was honesty in the lyricism of "Losing My Edge" in 2002, there is now sonic honesty in the vivacious rock and roll that is the London Sessions.

Hard to categorise, and impossible to assess immediately, like all of Slowdive, everything is alive will ever blossom with time.

With His Happiness Shall Come First Even Though We Are Suffering, Mutinta completes her heroic triptych. Processing her own fury and the fury stashed in the world’s memory. ... Leaving us stunned, devastated, ecstatic.

With New Threats, Davis, flanked by the talented Roadhouse Band, makes his mark, perhaps indelibly, joining a select group of artists who are deepening, broadening, and revamping the Americana genre.

Hannah is a culmination of everything Read has done up to this point and she delivers bittersweet missives through tender songwriting and a deft application of her strengths as a musician.

If you give the album the chance it deserves you will be rewarded by one of the strongest LPs you are likely to hear this year.

It’s an album that holds power found rarely these days – up there with Joy Division’s Closer in terms of transgressing the boundary between the macabre and ethereal, uniting music to dance to with spiritual experience, marking the twilight divide of utopia and dystopia.

On Lifetime, de Casier not only manages to create a truly hypnagogic aura, but captured this elusive quality of oneiric purity and grace. It’s the sound of an existence beyond our own, prismatic and startlingly beautiful.